Pennsylvania’s mail ballot applications are down from 2020. Here’s what that means for election night.

With two weeks to go until Election Day, nearly 1 million fewer voters have applied and been approved for mail ballots than at the same point in 2020, which will likely speed up the election results in the state.

So far this year, there have been nearly 1.9 million mail ballot applications approved in Pennsylvania as of Tuesday, with nearly 58% of mail ballots going to registered Democrats, 30% to Republicans, and 12% to other voters who aren’t registered with either of the major parties. While Democrats dominate mail voting, Republicans have increased their share from 2020.

More than half of the mail ballots across the state have been cast and returned. Voters can request ballots through Oct. 29 at 5 p.m. — one week before the election. Ballots can be returned to a local election office, sent back in the mail, or left in a drop box, but they must be received by 8 p.m. on Nov. 5.

Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have actively encouraged voters to cast ballots by mail this year, attempting to reverse fear mongering from Trump that severely diminished trust in the process in 2020. But, with COVID-19 no longer considered a public health emergency, Pennsylvania is seeing dramatically fewer mail ballot requests this year.

Two weeks before the general election in 2020, 2.8 million Pennsylvanians had requested mail ballots.

Now, also two weeks out, nearly 1.9 million people have requested mail ballots across the state – a drop off of nearly 1 million people. Dwindling mail voting was also visible during the 2022 midterm election. While midterms are expected to yield lower voter turnout than presidential election years, only about 1.3 million mail ballots were requested two weeks before that election.

The ability for all registered voters to cast their ballots by mail in Pennsylvania was made possible by a 2019 law called Act 77, which survived GOP-led attempts to overturn it through the courts.

The law’s implementation coincidentally aligned with the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the heated presidential race between Trump and President Joe Biden in 2020. While new to Pennsylvania, the practice was common in other states, and there was little partisan divide when it came to which party’s voters cast their ballots by mail before Trump’s political rise. In some states, Republicans voted by mail more.

But in 2020, Democrats made up 65% of returned mail ballots in Pennsylvania, while Republicans accounted for 23% after then-President Donald Trump falsely attacked mail voting as rife with fraud. Republicans returned a slightly lower share than were requested.

In 2022, requested and returned mail ballots skewed even bluer, with roughly 70% coming from Democrats.

Republicans have spent the past year trying to convince their voters that casting a ballot early and by mail is a good idea, even though Trump and his allies have continued to spread a deep-seated mistrust of the election system and continue to lie about the 2020 election being fraudulent.

They’ve had some success by increasing the proportion of mail ballot requests filed by Republicans — with a higher percentage of Republicans approved for mail ballots two weeks out than the party’s total share in 2020 — but they are still outnumbered by Democrats nearly two to one at this point in the race.

In the Pennsylvania presidential primary this year, Republicans made up about 26% of mail votes, a small increase from previous primaries.

Marc Meredith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, cautioned against overanalyzing mail ballot requests as an indicator of November’s results because Republicans and Democrats have consistently favored different methods of voting in the state.

“It’s down relative to 2020, in both terms of numbers and also the party differences, but trying to read more into that is really challenging because we know the type of people who vote by mail tend to be the most consistent voters and these people will vote no matter what,” Meredith said.

This party split will create artificial swings on election night. Meredith predicted the first round of results reported would swing blue as Pennsylvania counties have improved their ability to swiftly count mail ballots early in the evening before in person results begin coming in.

Results later in the night are likely to skew Republican with more in-person ballots being reported. But results reported later — in the evening hours or the days following the election — will once again skew towards Democrats as the remaining mail ballot results are reported.

While the number of ballots requested so far can’t give accurate insights into the results, the lower number of mail ballots indicate that the election will be declared sooner than it was in 2020, when the results weren’t called for Biden until the Saturday after the election. This year, officials have predicted they’ll be able to finish counting within a day or two after the election, rather than five days.

Philadelphia and its collar counties do not make up a disproportionate number of mail ballots.

A little more than 26% of Pennsylvania’s mail ballots have been requested from Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, and Chester Counties, which account for nearly 40% of the registered voters in the state. Philadelphia makes up nearly 11% of the approved mail ballot applications, and is home to nearly 23% of the state’s registered voters.

Registered voters in Allegheny County — which includes Pittsburgh — have requested the most ballots out of all counties in the state, at 229,247, making up a little more than 12% of the state’s approved mail ballot requests. A little more than 19% of the state’s registered voters live there.

In the GOP-leaning areas of rural Lancaster County, Butler County in Western Pennsylvania, and in Cumberland and York counties, neither party accounts for 50% or more of mail ballots.

These counties have sizable ballot requests from voters who aren’t registered with the two major parties, ranging from 11-14% of mail voters in these places so far. But Democrats still outpaced Republicans in mail ballot requests in these red counties.